Add more pdf-to-image engines?

[vinayak-mehta]

Ghostscript does the job of doing this currently but is a pain to install and debug and does not have a friendly license. Before we can do #13, does it make sense to use python-pdfbox. Then again, it downloads the pdfbox jar file and would need java to be installed on user systems.

atlanhq/camelot#346

[vinayak-mehta]

@dimitern What do you think?

[KOLANICH]

Also GhostScript has a bad fame of being vulnerable. Probably we want something written in a memory-safe language like rust or java. So +1 for pdfbox. But for this being efficient we need lebedov/python-pdfbox#10 first. Also there is https://github.com/katjas/PDFrenderer

[woshizouguo]

Is there any update on removing GhostScript?

[mara004]

Just FYI, pypdfium2 (ctypes binding to google's pdfium) is liberal-licensed, too.¹

pdfium is written in C/C++, though, so not an inherently memory safe language, as opposed to Java.
However, it's well-tested/analyzed and relied on by popular projects such as chromium and libreoffice, and as a tradeoff it doesn't require an additional runtime env.

Footnotes

1. disclaimer: I'm the author ↩

[mara004]

PR submitted: #384